By Phil Parker, Albuquerque Journal – August 2, 2010
CHIMAYO, NM — Friday marks the 65th anniversary of the U.S. dropping an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, an attack meant to end World War II. Activists have mobilized on eight acres in Chimayó with a plan to ensure that, on that day, Los Alamos National Laboratory hears their calls for a nuke-free world.
The 10-day event here — called Disarmament Summer Encampment — is being organized by Think Outside the Bomb, a national nuclear abolition group. Activists are camping on the grounds, owned by Teresa Juarez, whose grandson Miguel Moreno lives there and is one of Disarmament Summer’s lead organizers. Seven of the family’s dogs run around freely during the daytime, and tents are everywhere as nuclear opponents continued to fill up the camp on Sunday.
The plan is to gather Friday at Ashley Pond in Los Alamos for a rally that will incorporate performance art to tell stories of nuclear power’s damaging effects on communities around the country. Then the group will march through the town and onto lab property.
What the protest will look like has yet to be determined (there is talk of puppets), but members of Think Outside the Bomb want the whole procession carefully planned, so that when they take to the atomic bomb’s birthplace on Friday, they’re armed with a group of protestors educated on what exactly they’re standing up for.
To that end, about 30 people gathered in a wide circle under a tarp Sunday afternoon for a workshop called “Nukes 101.” Speakers from varying parts of the country took turns tackling a different aspect of what they see as nuclear power’s destructive legacy.
Twa-le Abrahamson told the group about the Spokane Reservation in Washington, where she’s from. Abrahamson said uranium mining went on there for decades, beginning in the 1950s, and the health effects have been devastating for tribal members who spent years working the mines with no clue of the toll to their bodies.
“A lot of people are sick,” she said. “There are a lot of widows.”
Rozlyn Humphrey, from Aiken, S.C., said plutonium from the Savannah River Site, built near Aiken in the 1950s to help construct nuclear weapons, has done irreparable harm to the land and river there.
“You dare not eat fish out of the Savannah River,” she said. And in a part of the country where hunting is dogma, she said, no one hunts because radiation in the ground has caused the vegetation to be contaminated, so animals that eat it aren’t safe.
Other activists told similar tales, but the essential point of Disarmament Summer Encampment may have been most plainly expressed by Jennifer Nordstrom, from Racine, Wis.: “Nuclear weapons are still being used — in testing and in the global politics of threat and fear. … New Mexico is the sacrificial state for the nuclear weapons industrial complex.”
Organizers with Think Outside the Bomb don’t want the lab closed down — Miguel Moreno said too many people in rural San Miguel County depend on Los Alamos for work: “We don’t want to take anything away; we want that money, we just want it for something good.”
Think Outside the Bomb’s Jono Kinkade said his organization is keeping a close eye on planning for a new plutonium pit in Los Alamos. The lab earlier this year announced plans for its Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement building, which would take a decade to build, with 22,500 square feet of lab space, much for analyzing plutonium and other radioactive materials. Funding for the building still hasn’t been approved by Congress, but the total price could be $4 billion, based on National Nuclear Security Administration proposals.
“Stopping the CMRR (from being built) is a central focus,” Kinkade said. “We’re trying to create political pressure, because that money can be better spent on cleaner technology and renewable energy.”
LANL officials have said that the mission, for decades, has not been to make new nuclear weapons but to maintain the country’s existing stockpile. As nuclear bombs age, scientists need to upgrade their technology. That work would be carried on at the CMRR building. And former NNSA manager Don Winchell told an audience in Española in June that the CMRR was vital for national security because of nuclear forensics work that helps the government track nuclear materials in other parts of the world.
“We’re not building fancy new weapons,” Winchell, who retired last month, said then.
“If they want to have a beautiful, expensive new facility, why not use it to create renewable energy?” Jennifer Nordstrom said. “There could be an economic transformation if they changed their focus from death and destruction to life-changing renewables.”
Think Outside the Bomb is hoping that message comes across loud and clear Friday.
For more information on Think Outside the Bomb, visit www.thinkoutsidethebomb.org.